Certain industrial and commercial activities involve a large number of articles and/or items that must be separated, identified, counted, and sorted, e.g., into groups, for use and/or processing. Industrial laundry articles, such as garments and other textiles, may be collected or handled in random bundles when they are used and/or soiled. Bins or other containers may be used to collect the articles from a number of users, which subsequently will require sorting, for instance to separate the articles for various cleaning processes, e.g., separating dark and light colors prior to washing. Delivery trucks may collect articles from a number of entities and/or locations.
In the textile service industry soiled garments or other textile items may be returned in large unsorted groups, requiring sorting for cleaning, processing, and return to the customer in an organized fashion. Sorting and other inventory control measures may be accomplished using workers who sequentially sort the many items at one or more stages of cleaning/processing, picking single items manually and identifying the items visually. This process may be slow and/or expensive due to the reliance on manual labor, and because human error may affect matching and sorting the articles and/or items, e.g., garments.
Bundles are most often managed in bulk because dealing with the articles on an individual basis may be labor intensive. After arriving at a commercial laundering facility, laundry may be separated in types dependent on which articles can be processed together. Sorting articles based upon different processes, delivery routes, and/or accounts may also occur.
Several identification and sorting systems are available that may provide some improvement over manual methods. In some instances, items may be marked with human readable text, bar codes and/or other markings that can be read with optical readers in order to identify garments that belong to a particular group. However, use of bar codes and other optically-based markings on goods that are flexible and assume a number of orientations that may distort and/or obscure optical-based identifying markings and therefore may easily distort and/or shield such markings. As a result, errors may occur that negatively affect inventory determination and/or record keeping. Furthermore, textile items may range in size from very small to very large. Additionally, articles may undergo severe wear, usage, and/or processing cycles, e.g., cleaning, that may damage identification tags.
Bar codes generally require a line-of-sight path to an optical reader, within a distance that may be proportional to the size of the bar code marking, and at a specific orientation with respect to the optical reader, which may be difficult constraints to satisfy under large scale laundry servicing conditions. Identification systems that rely on reading optical marking, e.g., bar codes, may not be well suited for use with particular textile articles, e.g., flat goods such as napkins, tablecloths, towels and bed linen items. Bar codes, and other optically-based markings, may be susceptible to degradation through soiling, wear, and cleaning, etc. Due to the precise spatial information associated with reading a bar code, e.g., bar width, orientation, spacing, etc., warping of the bar code that might occur on a textile, may result in increased rates of reading error, e.g., omissions and/or inaccuracies, and thus negatively impact inventory management.